Category: Machine Learning

In my last post I wrote about the 5 key differences between targeting and personalization. Several comments were made about the distrust of automated systems. While I understand the concerns, I think it is important to know that automated personalization systems using machine learning are still under human control…at least for now. First of all, I find it helpful to think of a personalization system as a combination of ... Read More »

Any system that uses rules to determine the content being displayed to a segment, persona or audience is a targeting system and not a personalization system. The goal of personalization is to surface the most relevant items to each customer based on their current needs and what you know about them as individuals. The more you know, the more you should be able to personalize the experience to drive ... Read More »

Every year, I take stock of the past year to get an idea of what the New Year will hold, so I went through the 2013 monthly round-ups to select stories that defined the state of personalization, predictive analytics and other major retail trends last year.

One of the beauties of big data and machine learning is that is it supposed to be completed agenda-less. The system collects data of all types and the machine learning algorithms watch and establish meaningful patterns and outputs as a result of the abundant data. Seems simple enough. Unfortunately, as with most things, it’s not that simple. First, most systems, at least in ecommerce, don’t collect ... Read More »